Exhibitions 2007

One of the many works from the Currier Museum Collection on view at the Hood.

A missionary figure from North America's Northwest Coast, part of the exhibition No Laughing Matter.

Pilobolus Comes Home: Three Decades of Dance Photographs

March 27-July 8, 2007Harrington Gallery

Pilobolus Dance Theatre, founded by Dartmouth students in 1971, has changed the course of contemporary dance through its signature style of closely combined bodies and its radically innovative approach to collaborative artistic creation. Dartmouth celebrated Pilobolus's donation of its remarkable archives with a residence, performances, educational programs, and this exhibition at the Hood of stunning photographs chronicling thirty-five years of the company's work.

Organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, and generously funded by the Harrington Gallery Fund.

Wenda Gu: the green house

Wenda Gu: Retranslation and Rewriting Tang Dynasty Poetry

June 6-September 9, 2007

The Hood Museum of Art and Dartmouth College presented a two-part installation and exhibition by avant-garde Chinese artist Wenda Gu. Part of his ongoing united nations hair monuments project, the green house was a massive sculpture created from hair collected in 2006 from thousands of Dartmouth College students, faculty, and staff, as well as Upper Connecticut River Valley community members. Wenda Gu's hair sculptures grow from his dream that through his art he might unite humanity and encourage international understanding. An exhibition of the artist's recent works on paper was presented concurrently in the Hood's galleries. An illustrated post-production catalogue was produced.

Organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, in partnership with the Dartmouth College Library, and generously supported by a grant from the LEF Foundation, the William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. Hall Fund, the Eleanor Smith Fund, and the George O. Southwick 1957 Memorial Fund.

American Art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art

June 9-December 9, 2007

American art has long been a mainstay of Dartmouth College's collections, beginning with a gift in 1773 of a Boston-made silver bowl from the Royal Governor John Wentworth to Dartmouth's founder, Eleazar Wheelock, in honor of the College's first commencement. The largest selection of the American collections ever presented at the Hood, this exhibition showcased over 150 paintings, sculptures, pieces of silver, and other decorative arts to 1950. Artists represented include Paul Revere, John Singelton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Doughty, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Frederic Remington, Willard Metcalf, Maria Oakley Dewing, John Sloan, Augusta Savage, Paul Sample, Maxfield Parrish, and Georgia O'Keeffe. An illustrated catalogue accompanied this exhibition.

Organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, and generously funded by the Bernard R. Siskind 1955 Fund, the Hansen Family Fund, and the Leon C 1927, Charles L. 1955, and Andrew J. 1984 Greenebaum Fund, and a generous gift from Jonathan L. Cohen, Class of 1960, Tuck 1961.

Resonance and Inspiration: New Works by Magdalene Odundo

June 30-October 14, 2007Gutman Gallery

This exhibition presented recent vessels and drawings by Kenyan-born ceramic artist Magdalene Odundo. Reflecting the technical and conceptual influences of an artist who lives abroad and has studied in England, India, and Nigeria, Odundo's work is inspired by millennia of vessel-making from all over the world. Her lustrous thin-walled vessels are so difficult to make that she completes only a few each year. An illustrated catalogue accompanied this exhibition.

Organized by the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida. The presentation of the exhibition was generously funded by the William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. Hall Fund.

Selected European Masterpieces of the Currier Museum of Art

July 21-September 23, 2007Harrington Gallery

During the renovation and expansion of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, ten Old Master and early modern paintings and sculptures were exhibited at the Hood. The European collection from the state's largest museum has long been admired by scholars and art lovers alike. The objects on display ranged from Renaissance paintings to a rare modernist sculpture and included works by Jacob van Ruisdael, John Constable, and Pablo Picasso.

Generously funded by the Harrington Gallery Fund.

American Works on Paper to 1950: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art

September 22-December 9, 2007

Complementing American Art at Dartmouth, this exhibition highlighted the museum's rich holdings of works on paper, including drawings, watercolors, prints, and photographs by such diverse artists as John James Audubon, Southworth and Hawes, William Trost Richards, James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Lewis Hine, Childe Hassam, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, James Van Der Zee, Dorothea Lange, Grant Wood, and Jackson Pollock.

No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity

October 6, 2007-January 13, 2008Harrington Gallery

This exhibition accompanied Dartmouth College's Humanities Institute of the same name and displayed objects and images that reflect visual humor's role in disseminating ideas about race, nationality, and ethnicity. It included anonymous broadsides, household objects, and comic stereographs, as well as works by eighteenth-century British satirists William Hogarth and James Gillray, nineteenth-century Japanese woodcut artist Yoshimori, French caricaturist Honore Daumier, artist and illustrator Thomas Nast (considered the "father" of the American political cartoon), and many contemporary artists. Select works were loaned from the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont.